Pride and Shame in Child and Family Social Work

Emotions and the Search for Humane Practice

Gibson, Matthew, Matthew Gibson

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781447344797
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781447344827
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

What role does emotion play in child and family social work practice?

In this book, researcher Matthew Gibson reviews the role of shame and pride in social work, providing invaluable new insights from the first study undertaken into the role of these emotions within professional practice. The author demonstrates how these emotions, which are embedded within the very structures of society but experienced as individual phenomena, are used as mechanism of control in relation to both professionals themselves and service users.

Examining the implications of these emotional experiences in the context of professional practice and the relationship between the individual, the family and the state, the book calls for a more humane form of practice, rooted in more informed policies that take in to consideration the realities and frailties of the human experience.

Appendix 1: Theoretical foundations of the study

Given that pride, shame, guilt, humiliation and embarrassment have both social and psychological elements to their experiences, the study of pride and shame is usually conducted by social psychologists. Social psychology is, however, not itself a unified field, consisting of psychological and sociological perspectives (House, 1977; DeLamater, 2006). Psychological social psychology starts from the inside out, focusing on the individual to study how they respond to social stimuli, whereas sociological social psychology starts from the outside in, starting with the social and cultural context and studying how this affects individuals. While pride and shame has mainly been studied from the psychological perspective (eg Tangney and Dearing, 2002), there are many who have critiqued such an approach as too narrow and limiting to understand the complexity of experiences of pride and shame (eg Gordon, 1981; Scheff, 2003). The approach taken in the research outlined in this book follows on from such critiques to argue that we cannot understand these experiences without understanding the social, cultural and political pressures that are exerted on social work institutions, organisations and practitioners.

This book, therefore, takes a sociological approach to social psychology, being broadly grounded in a constructionist orientation. The foundation of such a position is that people make sense of their experience through social interaction (Geertz, 1973), principally through language (Wittgenstein, 1967), which is not considered to represent some objective reality, but, rather, constitutes their social worlds. Language, therefore, enables not just knowledge and beliefs to be created, but also social institutions and identities (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). Given the importance of language in the creation of people’s worlds, to understand their experience, their beliefs, their identities and their emotions, we need to understand the discourses that construct and maintain such a world. We can consider a discourse as ‘a set of meanings, metaphors, representations, images, stories, statements … that in some way together produce a particular version of events’ (Burr, 1995: 48), which not only provides meaning for individuals and communities, but also provides the boundaries and, therefore, the possibilities for acting, thinking and feeling (Foucault, 1990).

A major strand of sociological social psychology within Europe argues that within the marketplace of discourse, certain opinions, images, metaphors and ideologies eventually become collectively adopted, and objects and things in the world are named, equipped with attributes and values, and integrated into a socially meaningful world (Wagner, 1996). These systems of values, ideas and practices can be considered as social representations constructed ‘for the purpose of behaving and communicating’ (Moscovici, 1961: 251). As Putnam (1988) argues, a representation is the conceptual ‘cookie’ cut out of the world-‘dough’ by virtue of discourse, consensus and social behaviour. Social representations are constructed for all social objects, such as for the profession of social work, the role of organisations that deliver social work services, the role of the social worker or the people social workers work with. The emotions of pride and shame are not experienced in isolation, but the product of active engagement within one’s social worlds that are filled with standards for thinking, feeling and acting. The use of social representations theory (Moscovici, 1961) provides a theoretical frame through which the creation, communication and integration of such standards, and therefore self-conscious emotional experience, can be analysed.

A social representation is both a process and content (Moscovici, 1961; Abric, 1987). It is the process of, for example, exploring, recognising, categorising and making sense of a particular phenomenon. It is also the content of the resulting ‘presentation’, or image, of the phenomenon through that process. The result is the practical, everyday knowledge of people within particular communities about particular social objects (Lahlou and Abric, 2011). A social representation can, therefore, be considered to be the body of information, beliefs, opinions and attitudes about a given object, which is discursively constructed over time and, as such, is part of a social group’s collective memory. Moscovici (1961) described two main processes in the construction of a social representation. The first is anchoring, in which meaning is given to new phenomena by integrating it into pre-established categories so that the unfamiliar becomes familiar. The second is objectification, in which abstract ideas are turned into concrete objects. People can, therefore, engage with, interact with and respond to social work as a profession and a practice in concrete ways.

A representation can be characterised as the relation between those who carry the representation, the object that is represented and the social context in which the representation makes sense (Bauer and Gaskell, 1999). Social representations are, therefore, not ‘things’ in the minds of people, but rather the significant structure, or meaning, that orientates a person’s or group’s interaction in a specific context (Harré and Gillet, 1994). There are, however, always power struggles within and between social groups as to the representation of social objects, and divergent, competing and conflicting representations can evolve and become available within these groups. The structural approach to social representations (Abric, 1976) argues that a representation consists of a central core set of elements that give it its meaning and peripheral elements that, while providing the context, constitute the moving and evolving aspect of the representation. How social objects are represented within and between specific communities is, therefore, not fixed and is under constant revision, change and renewal (Wagner, 1996).

The broad appeal of the social representations approach is that is provides a framework to analyse the social processes that affect individual experience. It is, however, an approach that complements a range of other theoretical ideas. Indeed, Breakwell (1993) has sought to develop both social representations theory and social identity theory by considering how they extend their respective explanatory powers. Also, given that many social representations become institutionalised, Koza and Thoenig (1995) sought to identify how the social representations approach could complement and extend institutional theory. So, while this book is grounded in a social representations approach, it draws on other ideas relating to identity and institutions, both of which are highly relevant to self-consciousness and the emotional experiences that result from it.

Appendix 2: Theoretical codes

Source	Theoretical codes
Glaser (1978, 1998, 2005)	•‘The 6 Cs’: causes, contingencies, consequences, contexts, covariance, conditions •The ‘type family’: ideal-type, constructed type •The ‘strategy family’: strategies, tactics, mechanisms, techniques, dealing with, handling, arrangements, managed goals, means •The ‘identity–self family’: self-image, self-concept, self-worth, self-evaluation, identity, social worth, transformations of self, conversions of identity •The ‘means–goal family’: end, purpose, goal, anticipated consequences, product •The ‘cultural family’: norms, values, beliefs, sentiments •The ‘consensus family’: agreement, cooperation, definitions of the situation, opinion, conformity, conflict, perception, non-conformity, mutual expectation •The ‘mainline family’: social control, socialisation, social organisation, social mobility, stratification, social institutions, social interaction •The ‘unit family’: collective, group, organisation, situation, context, behavioural pattern, family positional units, that is, status, role, role relationship
Creed et al (2014)	•Systemic shame (and pride) •A sense of shame (and pride) •Episodic shaming (and praising) •The felt experience
Moisander et al (2016)	•Evoking emotions •Eclipsing emotions •Diverting emotions
Lawrence and Suddaby (2006)	•‘Creating institutions’: defining, constructing identities, changing normative associations, constructing normative networks, mimicry, theorising, educating •‘Maintaining institutions’: enabling work, policing, deterring, valorising and demonising, mythologising, embedding and routinising •‘Disrupting institutions’: disconnecting sanctions, disassociating moral foundations, undermining assumptions and beliefs
Oliver (1991)	•Acquiescing: habit, imitate, comply •Compromising: balance, pacify, bargain •Avoiding: conceal, buffer, escape •Defying: dismiss, challenge, attack •Manipulating: co-opt, influence, control
Alvesson and Willmott (2002)	•Defining the person directly •Defining a person by defining others •Providing a specific vocabulary of motives •Explicatin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• one: Introduction
• two: Conceptualising pride, shame, guilt, humiliation and embarrassment
• three: Pride and shame in the creation of child and family social work
• four: Pride and shame in the creation of the ‘appropriate’ organisation
• five: Pride and shame in the creation of the ‘appropriate’ professional
• six: Theorising social workers’ experiences of self-conscious emotions
• seven: Forms of identification: a case example
• eight: Editor’s afterword
• nine: Conclusions
• Appendix 1: Theoretical foundations of the study
• Appendix 2: Theoretical codes
• References